"First, an HP LaserJet 1100, which continually misfed papers and smeared toner"
Misfed paper is a sign of a few possible things: - incorrect paper weight or thickness. - dirty pick-up mechanism.
By far, incorrect paper turns up far too often. If the paper is too thin or light, it's likely to slip. If the paper is too thick or heavy, it's likely to stick. Also make sure you load the paper into the printer the correct way up! Look at the ream of paper when you buy it, and on one end there will be an arrow indicating what side you should be printing on.
For the smeared toner, try to find out where in the printer it's smearing. Primarily, is it between the drum and the fuser, or after the fuser. If it's the former, then clean that part of the printer throughly! If it's after the fuser, then your fuser is malfunctioning (unfortunetly fusers often cost a lot of money to replace).
I'm the proud owner of a LaserJet 4L that's more than 10 years old. I've gone thru 7 toner units, and had a single hardware failure - the power supply, and it worked perfectly fine after that was replaced.
However it wasn't keeping up with the demand for printing, so I also got an HP LaserJet 2100TN.
First of all, you really should put out an RFP for your cluster.
We've got a 128 node (1 cpu per node) cluster from Atipa http://www.atipa.com/ that cost CDN$ 0.25M. 128 P4 Xeon, 1GB RAM, 120Gb IDE, Gigabit Ethernet. I'd expect you to get a lot more for your USD$.75M, like maybe doubling your size and getting AMD64 nodes. Look at your primary problemset first, see if it's IO-intensive or CPU-intensive to figure out what you want in the way of disk/networking.
The only thing I don't like about it is Atipa's configuration of Redhat8 (they didn't offer anything newer at the time). Look for something newer there.
Atipa is one of the suppliers for SGI-branded clusters as well.
I'd really like a cluster from http://adelielinux.com/en/, but I wasn't aware of them at the time we did our RFP and cluster purchase.
RAID is a wonderful concept, but work needs to be on points of failure other than the drives.
Most decent external RAID units today have dual hot-swappable dual power supplies and fans. However there is still only a single backplane and RAID controller board (IBM PowerPC chips are very popular for this) involved. I've both a backplane and controller a fail on me in the span of 2 years, in both cases taking all the data with them. These units were 6x200GB IDE drives, 1TB usable, 1 parity drive, and we had several cold spares available to hot-swap in on a failure.
Sure I agree that statistcally your drives, fans and power supplies are much more likely to fail than the backplane or controller, but it can still happen.
Never forget the important of having backups, and make sure you can recover from them as part of implementing your backup solution. (1 month rotation of Ultrium tapes here).
There is a solution to the above, but it's very costly, and that's RAID over distributed storage (iSCSI and the like).
refresh rates, large displays, low resolutions
on
Handling Eye-Strain?
·
· Score: 1
as some folk have said, get a decent monitor/LCD, and run it at the highest refresh rate your combined setup can handle, at a lower than usual resolution.
Eg on a 19" display I usually use 1024x768 or 1152x864. On a 21" display 1280x1024.
If you can afford an ultra-modern LCD with an extremely high contrast ratio it's definetly worth it, but make sure you get a decent refresh rate out of it, anything less than 85hz is still nasty. I run my CRTs at 100Hz+ (120Hz on the one that supports it).
Great to hear it, if you pass another prototype down to Gordon @ SFU Surrey, I'll gladly test it out some more for you:-).
i tested the prototype for these guys
on
Stolen Laptop Alarms
·
· Score: 4, Informative
As an SFU student and somebody that works on the SFU Surrey campus in research, I had the oppertunity to play with the actual prototype that these students put out.
I had my laptop secured with it, to test it out for a day.
Two things with it that I'd like to see rectified: 1. It seemed overly sensative to motions around it, a heavy truck went by outside (~6m away) and it went off. 2. if you use it, you do NOT have any way to cable-tie your laptop to a desk or whatever. yes it could be mutually exclusive, but I think these would be a lot more acceptance of this if you could use it in addition to another device to physically secure your laptop.
Go and use full scale professional tools, like Houdini (http://www.sidefx.com/), that offer free linux versions as well (small watermark on the output), and export to Renderman and use existing Renderman cluster stuff (BlueMoon Render Tools IIRC).
Given that spoofing uname returns isn't exactly hard, and Fluxbox/GNOME/KDE/etc. can be run under Cygwin, you can't really prove anything about platforms easily.
From working with a CAVE enviroment in a research lab for 2 years, I came to the simple conclussion that other than for developing and utilizing some custom 3D (with immersive stereo glasses, head tracking etc.) applications, and showing off your work on a big screen (with 3D of course).
There is a definate wow factor to it that helps in promoting the research, but for the most part it becomes stale fast.
Another shameless plug here, a custom math visualization system I spent quite a while in the development with: http://mvs.sourceforge.net/
I solidly recommend the USB extension devices from Icron technologies (http://www.icron.com/).
I work with somebody that is one of their former engineers, and we've got one of their Ranger 410 models being used to allow us to locate the station for our SGI Onyx3200 approx. 50m from the actual machine (which is in the server room).
I have it on good advice that they have a USB2 product in the works, which would be suitable for your CD burning.
However I think you still might want to consider providing both USB and Firewire to each of your proposed stations, as firewire provides a much better choice for your cd burning.
The Icron stuff will get your USB to either 100m or 500m depending which module you go with. Firewire will be more of a problem but 20m should be doable.
I work as a sysadmin, and I am also a developer for Gentoo Linux. Thru my career, i've used a lot of different cards.
My recommendation is solidly on the 3ware for truely solid hardware. It's is practically the only pure hardware RAID solution available. It shows up as a SCSI device to the system, and your system just needs to know that, not that 2 IDE devices are connected.
I've had horrible times trying to make the promise cards, esp the really new ones found on Tyan motherboards work, there is practically no support at all for them in linux (binary driver is no good since you can't even see the hard drives to install onto them).
The highpoint units are very good budget units. They have gone thru plenty of testing, and ship a good product, including some very nice UDMA/133 cables.
I have been in direct contact with the highpoint driver development team for the last several months helping them iron out bugs with their v2.10 linux driver, which finally contains RAID5 support now. I specificly helped them clean it up so that they could release the majority of the source code (there is a small binary part that appears to contain RAID checksumming routines and some properiatary card interface calls). There is also a largish binary only gui config tool, that I haven't personally used as they can't compile a version for my non-standard glibc setup.
If you have the money to spend, and just need mirroring, I'd put my full recommendation behind the 3ware card.
However, if you want a more budget option, or want to go further than 2 disk mirror/stripe and don't have a PCI-X slot, the highpoint is a good choice.
if you have PCI-X, go right and buy the higher 3ware models, you will not be sorry whatsoever.
I am currently running 8x 250gb maxtor drives on a highpoint controller at home for my personal storage unit, as RAID5, providing roughly 1.75tb of usable space.
SELinux is directly supported under Gentoo. See http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/harden ed/selinux-qui ckstart.xml for details on installing.
Or dig on the mailing lists for a recent post to gentoo-dev about it for a lot more information.
Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector
on
Antisocial Hardware?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
To add to this, the card in question uses the Realtek 8139 chipset (looking at the picture anyway), which is the '8139too' driver in the linux kernel.
AFAIK those cards do NOT come with a EPROM slot at all, and the realtek drivers with the cards are first rate.
The only way anything even remotely like what you describe could have happened would be if your winblows OS was subject to something else nasty.
It's windows, I wouldn't put it above doing this being the way that it is (but maybe we should ask those two russians that hacked microsoft before and may have looked at the source?)
Aside from what everybody else had said about backticks (`) being needed for today's keyboards, I end up using pretty much every key on my keyboard.
PrintScreen/SysRq for capturing data and bring up emergency consoles. Scroll-Lock for it's orignal purpose of pausing a screen of data for you to copy down, particullay when it's scrolling fast. Pause i don't use much anymore, but it used to be a god-send in old games. Break for when ctrl-c is assigned to something else.
Tilde and backtick are widely used in many programming languages.
However, the sole keys I don't have a use for on my keyboard are the annoying start menu keys and properties key. I need to use a USB keyboard because I'm on a non-legacy system, and I have not been able to find one that doesn't have those keys. I would really like some more modifier keys on keyboards, like the UNIX keyboards of old, that got up 17 different modifer keys at one point. Emacs becomes MUCH easier to use when single pair keystrokes are available instead of sequences of 2 or 3 pair keystrokes. Meta-Q for quit!
From some takes on it, mainly the P.Eng. (http://www.peng.ca) certification for engineers is what it takes to be a software engineer. Ergo by that all the requirements and responsibilities of a P.Eng. are involved.
The Visor edge does ship with a SpringBoard. I bought one that was refushished about a month ago. I'm really impressed at the use of the SpringBoard, if you are travelling, just go without the board, and it's nice and slim. When you get to civilization;-) plug in your springboard and Xircom Wireless card (I got it 3 days ago 8-) and hop on the net to read/.
From page 19, section 6: "In the following sections, SHA-512 is described before SHA-384. That is because the SHA-384 algorithm is identical to SHA-512, with the exception of using a different initial hash value and truncating the final hash value to 384 bits."
Is it just me, or is there an inherant insecurity in this?
By truncating the final hash value, you are losing 128 bits of message digest. Now in theory I can therefore change the message content, so long as I ensure that the first 384 bits of the digest remain the same. I've just defeated the entire purpose of a secure message digest.
From my own research, using a beowolf cluster in the university where I work, anytime that you have a data set with a larger range of possible values than the size of the message digest, it is possible (but very difficult) to create two messages with the same digest value.
The entire reason I have a strong interest in this, is not just for security, but for file checksums on large downloads. The entire thing that got me started, was a downloaded Slackware ISO from an unofficial mirror, that had the correct checksum, but was hopelessly corrupt due to transmission errors close to my side. There was enough change in the ISO that by fluke chance, the MD5 checksum was identical. That is already a 512 bit checksum that was defeated, albeit in-advertantly.
From a whole lot of research I have been involved in, for a while we worked with a company, TacTex Controls Inc.
They have a pressure sensative pad and system you can use, the MTC Express (http://www.tactex.com/prodMTC.htm), however, that is not where you would be interested directly.
Their technology uses fiberoptics in a rubber pad with a small controller. There is a lot of research in integrating their technolgies into other things (a prototype of a complete pressure sensative suit was discussed at one stage).
It fufills your requirements quite well. 256 levels of pressure for each region of the pad independently.
The MTC Express pad had only a DB9 serial connection, and needed a power input as well. However, the OEM material and controllers were a lot more flexible in usage.
I haven't been working in stereo vision for nearly as long as you, but presently, I am working with real cheap stereo vision. Our present cheap setup involves two $40 CDN USB webcams, and a frame for them, running on Linux. Total cost of stereo vision equipment beyond your system cost: $100 CDN
We need to improve our software a long way at the moment, but the ability is already there for the 3D images.
The main part of our application is actually how we are sending the video over multicast to several machines, including an SGI Onyx3200. We are using MPEG-4 for the video compression, real-time on high-end AthlonXP systems.
Slashdot Mirror
It works for my boss (using a Tungsten W), using SuSE9.2 Pro, and Gentoo, under Evolution with the pilot system.
He noted that it was much easier to get working in Gentoo than SuSE.
I did not state that I owned a 1100. I said I have a 4L and a 2100TN.
I was not formerly aware of a specific hardware defect in the 1100, but I have used vertical paper feed printers without any problems.
"First, an HP LaserJet 1100, which continually misfed papers and smeared toner"
Misfed paper is a sign of a few possible things:
- incorrect paper weight or thickness.
- dirty pick-up mechanism.
By far, incorrect paper turns up far too often. If the paper is too thin or light, it's likely to slip. If the paper is too thick or heavy, it's likely to stick. Also make sure you load the paper into the printer the correct way up! Look at the ream of paper when you buy it, and on one end there will be an arrow indicating what side you should be printing on.
For the smeared toner, try to find out where in the printer it's smearing. Primarily, is it between the drum and the fuser, or after the fuser. If it's the former, then clean that part of the printer throughly! If it's after the fuser, then your fuser is malfunctioning (unfortunetly fusers often cost a lot of money to replace).
I'm the proud owner of a LaserJet 4L that's more than 10 years old. I've gone thru 7 toner units, and had a single hardware failure - the power supply, and it worked perfectly fine after that was replaced.
However it wasn't keeping up with the demand for printing, so I also got an HP LaserJet 2100TN.
http://www.server-rack-online.com/48u-90--server-r ack.html
Good when you get given a crazy retro-fitted server room with stupidly high ceilings.
furthermore, make SURE you have sufficent physical space and airconditioning capacity for your new cluster.
First of all, you really should put out an RFP for your cluster.
.75M, like maybe doubling your size and getting AMD64 nodes. Look at your primary problemset first, see if it's IO-intensive or CPU-intensive to figure out what you want in the way of disk/networking.
We've got a 128 node (1 cpu per node) cluster from Atipa http://www.atipa.com/ that cost CDN$ 0.25M.
128 P4 Xeon, 1GB RAM, 120Gb IDE, Gigabit Ethernet.
I'd expect you to get a lot more for your USD$
The only thing I don't like about it is Atipa's configuration of Redhat8 (they didn't offer anything newer at the time). Look for something newer there.
Atipa is one of the suppliers for SGI-branded clusters as well.
I'd really like a cluster from http://adelielinux.com/en/, but I wasn't aware of them at the time we did our RFP and cluster purchase.
RAID is a wonderful concept, but work needs to be on points of failure other than the drives.
Most decent external RAID units today have dual hot-swappable dual power supplies and fans. However there is still only a single backplane and RAID controller board (IBM PowerPC chips are very popular for this) involved. I've both a backplane and controller a fail on me in the span of 2 years, in both cases taking all the data with them. These units were 6x200GB IDE drives, 1TB usable, 1 parity drive, and we had several cold spares available to hot-swap in on a failure.
Sure I agree that statistcally your drives, fans and power supplies are much more likely to fail than the backplane or controller, but it can still happen.
Never forget the important of having backups, and make sure you can recover from them as part of implementing your backup solution. (1 month rotation of Ultrium tapes here).
There is a solution to the above, but it's very costly, and that's RAID over distributed storage (iSCSI and the like).
as some folk have said, get a decent monitor/LCD, and run it at the highest refresh rate your combined setup can handle, at a lower than usual resolution.
Eg on a 19" display I usually use 1024x768 or 1152x864. On a 21" display 1280x1024.
If you can afford an ultra-modern LCD with an extremely high contrast ratio it's definetly worth it, but make sure you get a decent refresh rate out of it, anything less than 85hz is still nasty. I run my CRTs at 100Hz+ (120Hz on the one that supports it).
Great to hear it, if you pass another prototype down to Gordon @ SFU Surrey, I'll gladly test it out some more for you :-).
As an SFU student and somebody that works on the SFU Surrey campus in research, I had the oppertunity to play with the actual prototype that these students put out.
I had my laptop secured with it, to test it out for a day.
Two things with it that I'd like to see rectified:
1. It seemed overly sensative to motions around it, a heavy truck went by outside (~6m away) and it went off.
2. if you use it, you do NOT have any way to cable-tie your laptop to a desk or whatever. yes it could be mutually exclusive, but I think these would be a lot more acceptance of this if you could use it in addition to another device to physically secure your laptop.
Go and use full scale professional tools, like Houdini (http://www.sidefx.com/), that offer free linux versions as well (small watermark on the output), and export to Renderman and use existing Renderman cluster stuff (BlueMoon Render Tools IIRC).
Given that spoofing uname returns isn't exactly hard, and Fluxbox/GNOME/KDE/etc. can be run under Cygwin, you can't really prove anything about platforms easily.
From working with a CAVE enviroment in a research lab for 2 years, I came to the simple conclussion that other than for developing and utilizing some custom 3D (with immersive stereo glasses, head tracking etc.) applications, and showing off your work on a big screen (with 3D of course).
There is a definate wow factor to it that helps in promoting the research, but for the most part it becomes stale fast.
Another shameless plug here, a custom math visualization system I spent quite a while in the development with: http://mvs.sourceforge.net/
I solidly recommend the USB extension devices from Icron technologies (http://www.icron.com/).
I work with somebody that is one of their former engineers, and we've got one of their Ranger 410 models being used to allow us to locate the station for our SGI Onyx3200 approx. 50m from the actual machine (which is in the server room).
I have it on good advice that they have a USB2 product in the works, which would be suitable for your CD burning.
However I think you still might want to consider providing both USB and Firewire to each of your proposed stations, as firewire provides a much better choice for your cd burning.
The Icron stuff will get your USB to either 100m or 500m depending which module you go with. Firewire will be more of a problem but 20m should be doable.
I work as a sysadmin, and I am also a developer for Gentoo Linux.
Thru my career, i've used a lot of different cards.
My recommendation is solidly on the 3ware for truely solid hardware. It's is practically the only pure hardware RAID solution available. It shows up as a SCSI device to the system, and your system just needs to know that, not that 2 IDE devices are connected.
I've had horrible times trying to make the promise cards, esp the really new ones found on Tyan motherboards work, there is practically no support at all for them in linux (binary driver is no good since you can't even see the hard drives to install onto them).
The highpoint units are very good budget units. They have gone thru plenty of testing, and ship a good product, including some very nice UDMA/133 cables.
I have been in direct contact with the highpoint driver development team for the last several months helping them iron out bugs with their v2.10 linux driver, which finally contains RAID5 support now. I specificly helped them clean it up so that they could release the majority of the source code (there is a small binary part that appears to contain RAID checksumming routines and some properiatary card interface calls). There is also a largish binary only gui config tool, that I haven't personally used as they can't compile a version for my non-standard glibc setup.
If you have the money to spend, and just need mirroring, I'd put my full recommendation behind the 3ware card.
However, if you want a more budget option, or want to go further than 2 disk mirror/stripe and don't have a PCI-X slot, the highpoint is a good choice.
if you have PCI-X, go right and buy the higher 3ware models, you will not be sorry whatsoever.
I am currently running 8x 250gb maxtor drives on a highpoint controller at home for my personal storage unit, as RAID5, providing roughly 1.75tb of usable space.
SELinux is directly supported under Gentoo.n ed/selinux-qui ckstart.xml
See
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/harde
for details on installing.
Or dig on the mailing lists for a recent post to gentoo-dev about it for a lot more information.
To add to this, the card in question uses the Realtek 8139 chipset (looking at the picture anyway), which is the '8139too' driver in the linux kernel.
AFAIK those cards do NOT come with a EPROM slot at all, and the realtek drivers with the cards are first rate.
The only way anything even remotely like what you describe could have happened would be if your winblows OS was subject to something else nasty.
It's windows, I wouldn't put it above doing this being the way that it is (but maybe we should ask those two russians that hacked microsoft before and may have looked at the source?)
Aside from what everybody else had said about backticks (`) being needed for today's keyboards, I end up using pretty much every key on my keyboard.
PrintScreen/SysRq for capturing data and bring up emergency consoles. Scroll-Lock for it's orignal purpose of pausing a screen of data for you to copy down, particullay when it's scrolling fast.
Pause i don't use much anymore, but it used to be a god-send in old games. Break for when ctrl-c is assigned to something else.
Tilde and backtick are widely used in many programming languages.
However, the sole keys I don't have a use for on my keyboard are the annoying start menu keys and properties key. I need to use a USB keyboard because I'm on a non-legacy system, and I have not been able to find one that doesn't have those keys. I would really like some more modifier keys on keyboards, like the UNIX keyboards of old, that got up 17 different modifer keys at one point. Emacs becomes MUCH easier to use when single pair keystrokes are available instead of sequences of 2 or 3 pair keystrokes. Meta-Q for quit!
From some takes on it, mainly the P.Eng. (http://www.peng.ca) certification for engineers is what it takes to be a software engineer. Ergo by that all the requirements and responsibilities of a P.Eng. are involved.
The Visor edge does ship with a SpringBoard. I bought one that was refushished about a month ago. I'm really impressed at the use of the SpringBoard, if you are travelling, just go without the board, and it's nice and slim. When you get to civilization ;-) plug in your springboard and Xircom Wireless card (I got it 3 days ago 8-) and hop on the net to read /.
From page 19, section 6:
"In the following sections, SHA-512 is described before SHA-384. That is because the SHA-384 algorithm is identical to SHA-512, with the exception of using a different initial hash value and truncating the final hash value to 384 bits."
Is it just me, or is there an inherant insecurity in this?
By truncating the final hash value, you are losing 128 bits of message digest. Now in theory I can therefore change the message content, so long as I ensure that the first 384 bits of the digest remain the same. I've just defeated the entire purpose of a secure message digest.
From my own research, using a beowolf cluster in the university where I work, anytime that you have a data set with a larger range of possible values than the size of the message digest, it is possible (but very difficult) to create two messages with the same digest value.
The entire reason I have a strong interest in this, is not just for security, but for file checksums on large downloads. The entire thing that got me started, was a downloaded Slackware ISO from an unofficial mirror, that had the correct checksum, but was hopelessly corrupt due to transmission errors close to my side. There was enough change in the ISO that by fluke chance, the MD5 checksum was identical. That is already a 512 bit checksum that was defeated, albeit in-advertantly.
And we will need a war chalking symbol to go with this!
How about a stylized back to back PP ?
so it would look like a P with an extra loop in the wrong direction!
From a whole lot of research I have been involved in, for a while we worked with a company, TacTex Controls Inc.
They have a pressure sensative pad and system you can use, the MTC Express (http://www.tactex.com/prodMTC.htm), however, that is not where you would be interested directly.
Their technology uses fiberoptics in a rubber pad with a small controller. There is a lot of research in integrating their technolgies into other things (a prototype of a complete pressure sensative suit was discussed at one stage).
It fufills your requirements quite well.
256 levels of pressure for each region of the pad independently.
The MTC Express pad had only a DB9 serial connection, and needed a power input as well. However, the OEM material and controllers were a lot more flexible in usage.
I haven't been working in stereo vision for nearly as long as you, but presently, I am working with real cheap stereo vision. Our present cheap setup involves two $40 CDN USB webcams, and a frame for them, running on Linux. Total cost of stereo vision equipment beyond your system cost: $100 CDN
We need to improve our software a long way at the moment, but the ability is already there for the 3D images.
The main part of our application is actually how we are sending the video over multicast to several machines, including an SGI Onyx3200. We are using MPEG-4 for the video compression, real-time on high-end AthlonXP systems.
Nah, glow-in-the-dark condoms so that she can find whomever more easily in the dark.
Glow-in-the-dark lubricant would be even better, esp. if she is into women as well.